Researchers who developed standard claimed it would take "thousands of years to crack", but it took only 148 days

We're living in either a dark, dysmal time for cryptographers or a golden, glorious age for hackers depending on how you look at it. Casual hackers are making short work of supposedly modestly-secure older hashing standards like MD5, and even supposedly-super-secure "strong" encryption techniques are falling to novel attacks.

Researchers who worked with pair-based cryptography have in the past expressed confidence that 900+ bit cryptograms would take hundreds of thousands of years to crack. But Fujitsu, et al. achieved the feat in a mere 148.2 days -- less than half a year -- running on a 21-computer cluster with 252 cores.

Fujitsu has cracked an encryption that was previously estimated to take "hundreds of thousands of years" to break. [Image Source: Fujitsu]

By employing parallel programming methods and other novel techniques to the attack, the research team was able to cut the time that would have been required by a less state-of-the-art brute force attack with previous methods.

II. Cat and Mouse -- No System is Unbreakable

Fujitsu warns that the shocking success should serve as a warning to security firms that what seems like reliable standards may be crackable sooner than they think, and unsafe not too long after that. Writes the company:

As cryptanalytic techniques and computers become more advanced, cryptanalytic speed accelerates, and conversely, cryptographic security decreases. Therefore, it is important to evaluate how long the cryptographic technology can be securely used.

We were able to overcome this problem by making good use of various new technologies, that is, a technique optimising parameter setting that uses computer algebra, a two dimensional search algorithm extended from the linear search, and by using our efficient programing techniques to calculate a solution of an equation from a huge number of data, as well as the parallel programming technology that maximises computer power.

Cryptography today is facing a two-side assault. On the one side are the crackers, looking to employ novel methodology to reverse advance encryption. On the other side are the exploiters, looking to identify and leverage fundamental flaws in the implementation, flaws which sabotage the reliability of the underlying methods.

Unbreakable security is a fantasy. [Office Hackery]

Some public keys encrypted by the RSA standard were recently found to have "no security at all". The culprit, said Swiss researchers who published their findings in February, was improper generation. Likewise in 2010 Norwegian researchers published [abstract] results indicating quantum cryptography could be cracked via attacking the photon detectors that implemented the encryption via quantum mechanical effect. Here, the quantum cryptography itself was likely strong enought to stand up to any direct assault, but the glaring weak spot was the encoders/decoders in the system, which could be hijacked with traditional attacks.

Of course security researchers will surely scramble on to new and safer protection schemes. But it's more clear than ever that uncrackable encryption is anything but.